Security Alert: Qubic stays frozen after 1,404 wallets were drained

SECURITY ALERT

The protocol held.

The dice did not.

An attacker drained 1,404 wallets on the Qubic layer-1 network of about 2.94 trillion QU between 23:42 UTC on 17 Oct and 01:26 UTC on 18 Oct, after their seeds were generated with “insufficient randomness”, the Qubic team said on X.

That is roughly $1.4 million at CoinGecko’s QUBIC price before the attack, or about $1.3 million at Monday’s price, by our arithmetic. Qubic itself has not put a dollar figure on it.

More than a day later, the chain is still stopped.

Qubic’s public node reported tick 85,371,949 at 03:50 UTC on Monday, the same tick at which Qubic says its Computors, the network’s 676 validator seats, coordinated “a protective halt”.

The timeline, in UTC

• 17 Oct, 23:42. The first affected wallet is drained, according to Qubic.
• 18 Oct, 01:26. The last of 1,404 wallets is drained, 104 minutes later.
• Within about an hour of receipt. MEXC freezes the account that received 12.9% of the stolen QU, Qubic says. It has not given the exact time.
• 18 Oct, 03:37. A commit titled “fix: use cryptographically secure seed generation” lands in Qubic’s web wallet repository. Version 4.26.4 is tagged at 03:56.
• 18 Oct, 12:29. Qubic publishes its incident statement on X.
• 19 Oct, 03:50. The network is still at tick 85,371,949.

How did a wallet bug turn into a whole-chain stop?

What Qubic says went wrong

Qubic says the flaw was in how seeds were made, “not in the Qubic protocol itself.”

A seed is the secret string that controls a wallet; anyone who can reproduce it can move the funds (why the recovery phrase is the master key).

Qubic says a seed is affected if it was created on an iPhone or iPad in any browser before 18 Oct 2026, on a Mac using Safari before 18 Oct 2026, or in the Qubic iOS app before July 2025.

The code tells the rest.

Before the fix, the web wallet built each 55-letter seed by calling JavaScript’s Math.random() once per letter. The new version uses the browser’s crypto.getRandomValues() and discards byte values that would bias the alphabet.

Math.random() is not designed for secrets. MDN’s reference says plainly that it does not provide cryptographically secure random numbers.

Qubic has not explained why Apple’s browsers in particular produced seeds weak enough to be found. It says a full technical report will follow “once recovery is settled”.

If the weakness lived in the wallet, why could the attacker not cash out?

Frozen is not recovered

Because the chain stopped.

“87.1% of the drained funds never left the Qubic network and remain frozen in place,” Qubic said. The other 12.9% went to MEXC, which froze the receiving account, and exchanges have suspended QUBIC deposits and withdrawals, it added.

None of it has been returned.

Qubic says any resolution “is a decision for the Computor quorum”, that its core team is identifying every affected wallet and preparing options, and that a community poll is open on Discord. It has not said when the network will restart.

Who decides what a frozen coin belongs to, and how fast?

What we do not know

• The exact time of the halt, and whether any QU moved between the last drain and the stop.
• Why seeds made on Apple devices were affected and others, by Qubic’s account, were not.
• Whether wallets created on affected devices but not drained will need to move once the chain restarts, and how.

Qubic’s token had a market value of about $63.7 million on CoinGecko at 03:45 UTC, with trading thin while exchanges keep transfers shut. A different kind of seed exposure, a hardware implant that read recovery phrases, hit Ledger buyers this month (the Ledger implant that read recovery phrases).

Protect yourself

• If you made a Qubic seed on an iPhone or iPad, in Safari on a Mac before 18 Oct, or in the Qubic iOS app before July 2025, Qubic says it is affected. Treat it as exposed and follow Qubic’s official channels for migration steps once the network restarts.
• New seeds should come from Qubic wallet 4.26.4 or later, which Qubic says can no longer create weak seeds.
• If you lost funds, Qubic advises a report to the police or cybercrime authorities with your wallet ID, the amount and the transaction link. It says formal reports help exchanges keep funds frozen.
• Nobody from Qubic will message you first, ask for your seed or offer paid recovery, the team says. Treat any such offer as a scam.
• Builders: never generate keys or seeds with Math.random(). Use the platform’s cryptographic random source.

If a wallet’s randomness can fail silently for years, who is checking the dice?

Corrections and new evidence: [email protected]

This article is for information only and is not investment advice.